Aesthetics

In recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen's remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive...

The Intertwining of Aesthetics and Ethics: Exceeding of Expectations, Ecstasy, Sublimity analyzes the common experiential ground for both aesthetics and ethics by considering experiential environment (both nature and art), the precedents to desire, the...

The Philosophical Contexts of Sartre's The Wall and Other Stories: Stories of Bad Faith presents a philosophical analysis of all five stories in Sartre's short-story collection. Kevin W. Sweeney argues that each of the five stories has its own...

This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsley's classic work.Book InformationISBN 9780915145096Author Monroe BeardsleyFormat HardbackPage Count 678Imprint Hackett Publishing Co, IncPublisher Hackett Publishing...

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described "a one hundred per cent image-space." Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons...

Philosophers working on aesthetics have paid considerable attention to art and artists of the early modern period. Yet early modern artistic practices scarcely figure in recent work on the emergence of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy over the course...

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have...

These collected studies on the philosophy of the image offer the fundamental insight that images alone make the artificial presence of things possible. Images present things as exclusively visible, released from the laws of physics. Taking this idea as...

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value...

We imagine that art and money are old enemies, but this myth actually reproduces a violent system of global capitalism and prevents us from imagining and building alternatives. From the chaos unleashed by the 'imaginary' money in financial markets to...

In his Enquiry --which has been described as "certainly on of the most important aesthetic documents that eighteenth -century England produced" --the young Burke provided a systematic analysis of the 'sublime' and the 'beautiful,' together with...

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative...

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems,...

First collected in Italy in 1985, Art's Claim to Truth is considered by many philosophers to be one of Gianni Vattimo's most important works. Newly revised for English readers, the book begins with a challenge to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, who...

The spiritual crisis of the twenty-first century is overload boredom. There is more information, content, and stimulation than ever before, and none of it is waiting passively to be consumed. The demands exceed our capacities.The Spiritual Significance...

The essays collected in this volume examine the multidisciplinary and multicultural nature of the subject of aesthetics. The contributed articles address the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to contemporary social, political, and cultural issues...

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live in? McKenzie Wark surveys three areas at the cutting...

The essays in this volume, indebted in great part to Jacques Maritain and to other Neo-Thomists, represent a contribution to an understanding of beauty and the arts within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. As such they constitute a different voice in...

First published in 1954, The Contemplative Activity analyses our knowledge of aesthetic experience, making the basic assumption that the existence of such experience is a hard core of fact which can only be described. Haezrahi’s approach to the problem...

In literature and the visual arts, zero degree represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to and outside of the dominant cultural order. Starting from Roland Barthes' 1953 book Writing Degree Zero, this volume examines the historical,...

In this book, George Dickie presents a theory about how to judge a work of art as opposed to a theory that explains why a particular work is defined as art. Focusing mainly on the writings of Monroe Beardsley and critically examining the views of seven...

This expanded edition of C. L. Hardin's ground-breaking work on color features a new chapter, Further Thoughts: 1993, in which the author revisits the dispute between color objectivists and subjectivists from the perspective of the ecology, genetics, and...

Objects are all around us - and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature,...

Contributors: Madeleine Brainerd, Joe Conway, Fraser Easton, Christopher GoGwilt, Shari Goldberg, Melanie D. Holm, Sarah Kay, Kaori T. Kitao, Holt V. Meyer, Isabel A. Moore, Fawzia Mustafa, Gavin Sourgen. Mocking Bird Technologies brings together a...

The Work of Difference addresses a fundamental ontological question: What is literature? And at the heart of this question, it argues, is the problem of the new. How is it that new works or new forms are possible within the rule-governed orders of...

More than any other area of late-twentieth-century thinking, gender theory and its avatars have been to a large extent a Franco-American invention. In this book, a leading Franco-American scholar traces differences and intersections in the development of...

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is...

This book proposes that aesthetics begin not with concepts of being or semblance, but with a concept of appearing. Appearing bespeaks of the reality that all aesthetic objects share, however different they may otherwise be. For Martin Seel, appearing...

Through a comparative analysis of diverse texts and contexts, this book offers a cultural history of the interplay between the aesthetic and the political in the formation of personal and collective identity that crystallizes into the Chinese aesthetic...

Theory has been an embattled discourse in the academy for decades. But now it faces a serious challenge from those who want to model the analytical methods of all scholarly disciplines on the natural sciences. What is urgently needed, says D. N...

Between the radical, creative capacity of our imagination and the social imaginary we are immersed in is an intermediate space philosophers have termed the imaginal, populated by images or (re)presentations that are presences in themselves. Offering a...

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has earned international acclaim for his analysis of contemporary capitalism, in particular his influential concept of immaterial labor and his perceptive writings on debt. In Videophilosophy, he reveals the...

This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal...

In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented...

The Seventh Sense is the definitive study of the aesthetic theory of the great eighteenth-century philosopher Francis Hutcheson, arguably the founder of the modern discipline of aesthetics, and one of the most important figures of the Scottish...

As the international art market globalizes the indigenous image, it changes its identity, status, value, and purpose in local and larger contexts. Focusing on a school of Australian Aboriginal painting that has become popular in the contemporary art...

Theodor W. Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert...

Philosophical questions about the arts go naturally with other kinds of questions about them. Art is sometimes said to be an historical concept. But where in our cultural and biological history did art begin? If art is related to play and imagination, do...

Nelson Goodman's disparate writings are often written about only within their own particular discipline, such that the epistemology is discussed in contrast to others' epistemology, the aesthetics is contrasted with more traditional aesthetics, and the...

The Aesthetics of Food sets out the continuing philosophical debate about the aesthetic nature of food. The debate begins with Plato's claim that only objects of sight and hearing could be beautiful; consequently, food as something we smell and taste...